


Dragon Wounds

by traceyourshadows



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dragons, Gen, Maybe some angst, Oneshot, Post-War, Storms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 04:16:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1331557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/traceyourshadows/pseuds/traceyourshadows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean's seen a dragon and lived. He doesn't think this is an accident.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dragon Wounds

The sky is cloudless, the light blinding as it reflects off the snow and water. It’s the first lull the lakeside city has seen all night. When the population emerges from their houses, they blink hard as if just waking up. Despite being relieved from the relentless barrage of wind and snow, nobody dares to break the deafening silence. Families huddle together and shush wondering children; grown men tense themselves as they stare at the sky. The storm had gone as quickly as it started—coming forth in a torrent, quickly burying the town in miserable chills and snow—but nobody trusts the evident reprieve enough to celebrate it. 

Dean Winchester is one of those who has just emerged from his house. His jaw is clenched, and he’s shivering for more reasons than one. His eyes frantically scan the sky. It’s empty, but it’s _too_ empty, and the anxiety that accompanied this storm hasn’t left him yet.

“You okay?” his brother, Sam, whispers from close behind him. 

Dean tucks his head a little deeper into the hood of his coat. He hasn’t spoken a word to Sam about the turmoil taking over his chest; he’s made his trembling out to the chill in the air without offering any other explanation. “Yeah. M’fine.” He figures that a turmoil _outside_ is enough to deal with for one day. Though he can feel Sam’s unconvinced gaze lingering on him, he pretends like he can’t tell and redirects the subject. “I just don’t think this is over.”

“Yeah.” Sam shifts, and Dean glances back to find his brother similarly studying the empty sky. “Should we go into town? Stock up on groceries while we can?”

“Probably, but I’m _not_ taking my baby out in this mess.” Dean glances the street over, or what he assumes is its general location. Not even snow plows have dared to travel in this weather, at least not in the less active suburban streets. 

“Well, I’d call a cab, but I doubt they’re servicing anyone right now.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Sighing, he glances over at the driveway where his Impala is practically buried. “We have enough for at least a few days. Can’t we at least wait until we can see the road?”

Sam huffs. “Fine, but don’t complain if you finish all the pizza and run out of frozen junk food.”

Dean kicks snow at Sam in response before returning inside, where it’s relatively warmer. The power went out within moments of the storm starting, so he and his brother have settled themselves around the crackling fireplace since then. The room is piled full of blankets, bags of chips, and beer, and Sammy’s laptop rests off to the side, where they’d been sacrificing some of its battery to watch Dirty Harry for probably the twentieth time in Dean’s life. 

As Dean seats himself in the nest of blankets on the couch, he eyes the cooler full of alcohol. Maybe another one would take the edge off the burning nerves.

“Dean, no,” Sam says, far too firmly for his older brother’s liking. 

Dean scowls up at him. “If the world ends tonight, I’d rather go out drunk.”

“The world’s not going to end. You’re only drinking because you’re upset.” Sam sits next to Dean with his most earnest and focused expression. “What’s going on?”

A surge of fear rises up at the mere recall of its source. “Nothing,” Dean growls. 

Something outside seems to growl, too—maybe the wind pushing a garbage bin over. Both brothers look up, Dean with significantly more alarm, jumping a little as he does so. Sam glances over at Dean, who for all his sudden interest in their curtained windows—as if they could blow in at any moment—doesn’t notice.

“Is . . . something weird happening?” Sam asks.

“Huh?” Dean turns to Sam as if he’d forgotten he was there. 

“Is something weird happening?” Sam’s voice is as calm as it could possibly be, but Dean still acts like a frightened rabbit, avoiding so much as looking at the questioning brother.

“No,” he scoffs, making his most full and relaxed grimace, but the lack of eye contact says more than his forced animation. “How weird could a storm possibly be?”

“You’re the one who fought in the war. You tell me.”

Dean hunches very deep within his blankets. Sam’s just about assumed he won’t hear anything more on the subject and stands to poke at the fire—when Dean mutters, “You ever seen a dragon before?”

“Not in person, no.” Sam’s trying very hard not to appear too interested, not to scare Dean off, but he can’t help his quick return to the cushion beside his brother.

Dean manages to look up at him. Sam’s heart clenches in sympathy when he sees Dean’s eyes muddied with fear. “I have. A few of them.”

“You fought them?”

“Sammy, you don’t fight dragons. You _can’t_.”

Sam waits patiently, resisting the urge to pour physical comfort onto Dean, who’s staring into space, reopening poorly scabbed-over memories. 

Finally, Dean speaks again. “They’re huge. A wing would overshadow our house. Fire-drakes would turn the town to ashes in a matter of minutes.”

Sam’s leaning in. Even his breathing has quieted down.

“I saw a frost-wyrm once. Most of the soldiers died fleeing its storm.”

“But not you.”

“Not me.”

“You saw the dragon. And _lived_.” The severity with which Dean addressed the situation wasn’t enough to keep awe from Sam’s eyes.

“Yeah. But dragons are smart, Sammy. It _let_ me live.” He eyes his brother from the confines of the blanket draped around him.

“. . . you think that’s why there’s a blizzard?”

“This isn’t just a blizzard. It came and went too quickly, and it’s too strong, too destructive. Dragons _take people out._ They want to cause destruction and mayhem.”

“Like this? With everyone hiding inside? Kind of hard to get a meal if you’re scaring people _in_.”

“It’s not killing to eat. It just wants to wreak havoc.”

“Huh.” Sam doesn’t have anything else to say to that.

Dean falls silent, sifting over his thoughts, and Sam rises again from the chair to go to the window. Dean watches his brother as he peeks out the curtain.

“The storm is still gone,” Sam tells him. 

“For now.”  


Another half hour passes before the silence of the weather is broken. Dean and Sam are drinking cold beer when a distant rumbling takes hold. Sam glances at Dean, who is staring at the window again. The rumbling grows louder, bringing with it the roaring of fast-approaching winds—and a deeper, rhythmic pulse of vibration that makes the entire house shake. 

The house doesn’t pulse around them more than twice before Dean stands. Sam expects to see his eyes turn wild and frightened, but the expression his older brother wears is all business, the carefully shielded look of a man forced to get a grip on his own terror. “Basement, Sam, now!”

A chill goes up Sam’s spine, and he suspects that suddenly _he’s_ the wild-eyed one. Without protest he obeys his brother. 

By the time he’s yanked the door open and started onto the first stair, glass shatters all along the side of the house. He halts there and spins around, gaping at what damage he can see from the stairwell. That’s when he realizes he is alone in the stairwell. 

“Dean!” Sam’s heart is pounding, but he races back out to the livingroom. Snow has started to swirl and pile in the room, and a deep chill takes him. The windowpanes are lying in pieces amongst the snow, the fireplace has been blown out, the front door is wide open, and his brother is nowhere to be seen.

He calls his brother’s name again and staggers against the freezing wind towards the door.

There Sam just barely spots the dark pillar of his brother, the image blurred by the suddenly revived blizzard. “Dean!” he cries again, voice burning with the effort. A particularly strong wind shakes the house and swipes Sam against the doorframe. Dean staggers sideways but doesn’t respond to Sam.

Storm disregarded, Sam struggles outside, but he doesn’t make it even two steps before another impossibly powerful gust of wind knocks him to the ground. When he looks up, he can’t see Dean for a moment. Terror seizes him, and he clambers back up—at about the same time his brother does, rising from the snow, neck craned up to look at the sky. 

Sam darts forward again—and is shaken to the ground a final time as the ground quakes. At first he thinks it is an earthquake, but when his head raises and he locates Dean’s form again, he finds a huge, glittering, ice-colored pillar has placed itself in front of Dean.

The image at first doesn’t make any sense, but then Sam freezes as he realizes what he is seeing. The pillar is a leg, terrifyingly large—the storm is so thick that he can’t even it in entirety, but he sees it towering up above their house, and he sees the thick, terrible claws that are attached to it at the base.

He screams his brother’s name.

A huge, serpentine head dips down into his hazy field of view. Amidst the flurry he can just make out the row of huge, sharp fangs and the single eye that glints at him. Sam almost thinks it’s smirking at him. Then the storm picks up so greatly that Sam’s face seems to burn with the ferocity of the snow that hits him. He ducks his head down, hiding it in the snow that has already fallen, helpless to do anything but hold still as the ground again shakes, and more rhythmic vibrations shake the world. But the storm fades abruptly away, and when he realizes the air no longer bites his back and that the shaking has ceased, he cautiously lifts his head again.

The dragon is gone, and Dean is nowhere to be seen.

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this off a prompt my moirail gave me!


End file.
